still life - life still

“The viewer’s gaze is captivated by the still life, even if the eye wanders only for brief moments, delighting in the chromatic and semantic spectacle.” — Matthias Harder

Vera Mercer reinterprets the classical still life, transforming this time-honoured genre into a contemporary visual language of extraordinary visual power.

Her opulent photographs evoke the sumptuous hunting still lifes and kitchen scenes of seventeenth-century Flemish painting. Crabs, fish, game and poultry encounter flowers, fruit, candles and antique accessories. Mercer draws upon the pictorial tradition of the historical still life, yet develops it consistently further, giving it a distinctive and unmistakable form of expression through the medium of photography. She quotes the traditional language of symbolism, while stripping it of its original religious and moral authority.

Nothing is left to chance. As in a solemn ritual, in which every action and every object acquires meaning, Mercer’s visual worlds are composed down to the smallest detail. Each object is deliberately selected and positioned, and placed in relation to the others through light, colour and perspective.

Her large-scale photographs possess an extraordinary sensual presence. Feathers, scales, petals and fruit seem almost tangible. Light models the surfaces, accentuates their materiality and lends the scenes a theatrical, at times mystical, atmosphere.

Yet Mercer’s work is not concerned solely with beauty and abundance. Her still lifes also carry within them the tradition of the Vanitas. The living stands alongside the dead, the seductive beside the disturbing: it is precisely this ambiguity that creates the particular tension of her work.

Her roots in theatre and her early training in dance are palpable: Mercer’s still lifes possess a choreographic and stage-like quality. Every object has its place, every form responds to another, and the light supports the dramaturgy of the scene. Her many years of experience running and designing several restaurants, together with a pronounced sensitivity to the atmosphere of hospitality, are equally evident in these works. Her precise handling of ingredients, forms, colours and their arrangement is combined with an acute sense of composition and atmosphere.

Thus, in Vera Mercer’s work, the still life becomes a tableau of life: lush and sensual, seductive and disturbing, at once contemporary and timeless. The traditional genre is not merely quoted, but brought into the present.

Vera Mercer, born in Berlin in 1936, married the later Eat Art artist Daniel Spoerri in 1958 and moved with him to Paris. There, she immersed herself in the artistic avant-garde and photographed artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Niki de Saint Phalle.

What is now regarded as her signature style emerged in the 2000s: her meticulously composed still lifes, initially produced digitally and on a large scale, are increasingly also photographed using analogue processes and developed by hand as platinum prints. Her work has earned her international recognition.